Everything Else

There was the original AI hype back in the 60s and impractical ETAs re success with the Turing Test. Then we discovered things were a bit harder to build than we thought.

Again, in the '80s, there was a rash of AI optimism. Advancements were made, but they did not live up to the promise(s).

Now, once more, there is massive interest in Artificial Intelligence. Call it ML, Cognitive, Deep Learning... whatever. It's AI. Who here thinks it might actually be for real this time?

For the record, IBM, Google, US MIL, MSFT, the EU etc. all do. An interesting headline from the Gartner conference:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/26 ... -2025.html

Also, by way of clarification, I'm not asking about the unanswerable subjective questions such as 'when is something sentient' etc. But rather if you believe that machines that make significant decisions on their own will become pervasive, good enough to be used pretty much everywhere and eventually, exceed human capability in the majority of disciplines.

No.

As a species, our science is advancing to a point where we can begin to actually see some progress in the field of AI. I would say that yes, this time it is for real but there will not be any fanfare or big press releases or manumission of mainframes. Unfortunately I don't think we will be able to recognize AI when we achieve it, since we have no idea how neural networks create self-consciousness.

The problem with things like lisp, is that it suffers the original sin of being comprised of mere mathematical abstractions; and when you traverse an integrative level, you're forever confined to the arithmetic logic unit.

Mathematics is a mere closest-metaphor for modelling phenomenon, and I've always disliked it because it was used by reductionist thinkers that tended to wrong conclusions. I don't think it is suitable for implementing intelligence.

Of course neural-nets are interesting and used in engineering. In this case, AI was a success: the development of a human being with everything severed from his brain save for the regions essential to performing regressive analysis. How desirable to the department of defence. How far more viable than hiring a mathematics intern, economically. Autistic persons have higher maintenance costs, require ancillary personnel, and generate lower throughput. Interns get tired, need to be paid, and their disposal and sanitation costs are higher.

In this case, AI was a success.

sgifanatic wrote: Now, once more, there is massive interest in Artificial Intelligence. Call it ML, Cognitive, Deep Learning... whatever. It's AI. Who here thinks it might actually be for real this time?

As long as it can surpass an indian call center, it's a huge improvement.

skywriter wrote: As long as it can surpass an indian call center, it's a huge improvement.

on the topic, i want to vote for yes to be honest i'm just being bias because i am doing something about Lisp so hehe i hope this will be a good start

AI in a competent form will require organic circuits in order to overcome the absolutely massive hardware burden that process-intensive AI needs. In the last 10 years we did start to push further into biotechnology but we aren't there yet.

AI is an illusion.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." - Nils Bohr

But then 10 years into the future is not such a big time range. I think we won't see any generic intelligence - like it resides in every human being - anytime soon. However it would not surprise me to see some form of specialized "intelligence". E.g. think about the routing and scheduling of police patrols. Today software exists which recommends the best routes to achieve lower crime rates. Very often, after haven proven successful, these system's plans are thrusted more and more and the system basically advises the schedules of the cops.

Or the big area of logistics. Managing all those planes, ships, and transporters to increase their utilization and minimize shipping times. This was a very difficult task and today the human being pales in comparison to software in this task.

But is this really intelligence? I think the term AI was burned during the demise of all the Lisp Machines at the end of the cold war. Most companies in this field of business went bankrupt in the late '80. Nowadays nobody wants to be associated with AI. We rather like to call it "Big Data" and not to be very specific how to refine the essence of data into meaning and meaning into predictions. This fits much better with the business of delivering domain specific solutions. Though, once upon a time we called these expert systems.

So I think we simply see the reappearance of expert systems. Not much real intelligence there. And even less artificial intelligence. Just clever solutions to very narrowly defined problems.

Oskar45 wrote: AI is an illusion.

Self and what we perceive as consciousness is also an illusion, a construct being run on a neural network. We call AI - as it stands now - an illusion because we can see the strings, we can see the paint on the puppet and know that it is a pale imitation of us.

I think the reason most naive realists do not want to see Artificial General Intelligence, or think it is impossible, is that if AI (AGI) is created it would allow us to see OUR strings... our cheap little puppet tricks of evolutionary biology. The blind ignorance and groping menace of pink goo, like sentient silly putty eating on a sandwich. The horror!

VenomousPinecone wrote: I think the reason most naive realists do not want to see Artificial General Intelligence, or think it is impossible, is that if AI (AGI) is created it would allow us to see OUR strings... our cheap little puppet tricks of evolutionary biology.

Hmm, shouldn't the discovery of an AGI work exactly the other way round? First we learn about all the strings pulling us, then we simulate all these strings and call ist AGI? Because assuming that AGI can be created without knowing about the strings beforehand ... this would assume a very spontaneous great jump forward in computing. Something where applying the buzzword "rupture" to new technology would actually make sense.

tomvos wrote: First we learn about all the strings pulling us, then we simulate all these strings and call it AGI?

To learn about the strings pulling us, we would have to admit that we are not what we think we are and in a very real sense do not control our bodies. I think that may be beyond most humans, beside the fact that we would be diagnosing the organ with the same flawed organ. I honestly doubt we would be able to see all the strings and faithfully reconstruct them even if we could.

I would dare say instead that we would not need to build the strings or be lucky enough to have a very spontaneous great leap ahead in computing, just another regular step. This is the way we see it in nature, consciousness being a trait that is emergent in humans due to blind evolutionary groping with the strings merely a side effect of the illusion. What is to prevent that from happening with human endeavor as we thrust our minds out to solve problems that we know so little about? AGI need not be purpose built, but instead be an emergent property of something not intended to have AGI. In its innocence, its unintended self, it would be the very image of its creators.

Oskar45 wrote: AI is an illusion.

So is human intelligence.

zahal wrote:

Oskar45 wrote: AI is an illusion.

So is human intelligence.

Right you are. But then again, "intelligence" is a too diffuse concept anyhow

skywriter wrote:

sgifanatic wrote: Now, once more, there is massive interest in Artificial Intelligence. Call it ML, Cognitive, Deep Learning... whatever. It's AI. Who here thinks it might actually be for real this time?

As long as it can surpass an indian call center, it's a huge improvement.

You won't find me disagreeing with that one

commodorejohn wrote: Not that I completely (or even mostly) agree with hamei, but pulling out the "well, well, you're just a stupid person who hates Progress and lots of other people thought new things were bad over the course of history! " argument is the tech-discussion equivalent of resorting to Hitler comparisons.

Well, it's unfortunate you think that, and it's also unfortunate that you ascribed the worst possible motive to my post.

I don't think this discussion is going anywhere, and frankly, after the comment above, I doubt it will go anywhere. Adieu.

commodorejohn wrote: Not that I completely (or even mostly) agree with hamei, but pulling out the "well, well, you're just a stupid person who hates Progress and lots of other people thought new things were bad over the course of history! " argument is the tech-discussion equivalent of resorting to Hitler comparisons.

self awareness, that post has none...

Ahh, a keyboard again. The new definition of hell is, to have something to type but stuck on an iBad or a "smart"phone.

Oh wait, I must be mistaken ! The Great Innovator Jobs proclaimed that we will all be conducting our affairs on these "high-tech" devices !

Heaven help us.

Oskar45 wrote: ... vitriolic posts?

Mmm. Well, if you are one of those people who get insulted when a sanitation engineer is called a janitor or a marketing specialist a whore, then I guess you could consider it vitriolic. In my day we called a spade, "spade."

Back to Artificial Intelligence, sgifanatic, you can't be serious ? Are you reliving happy childhood memories of Mary Martin or something ? Let's take a quick look at a few examples of the "intelligence" of our current world :

Private sector one : Nokia is a well-known name in phones, yes ? Owned the market, in fact. Hundreds of thousands of units produced, dominated the market for decades. Nokia N900 : battery control is done in software. If the battery runs down, you can't charge the phone. Worthless, just like the fucking idiots who designed it.

Private sector two : Oracle. 250 million dollars for a website that didn't work. "Not our fault ! They had unrealistic expectations !" Yeah, well, you took the job and you took the money, assbreaths. Fail, bigtime.

Public-private cooperation : Oakland - San Francisco bridge. Ooh, this is a good one. Every step of the way this has been a multi-billion dollar fiasco. From the very beginning (thousands of cracks in the welded superstructure - oh, we'll just pay Carnegie-Mellon to say that cracks are okay ! Anyone here ever take mechanical engineering 101 ? Yeah, cracks no problem) to the fasteners that retain the structure sideways in an earthquake that snapped when tightened to now the fasteners that hold the tower onto the base that have been sitting in water rusting for five years or so and cannot be replaced .. oh yeah, this is a certain-sure demonstration of the power of the human brain. Bridges are nineteenth-century "technology" but our highly-educated managers couldn't figure it out. Hmmm.

Public sector : let's go right to the top. Anyone here take a first-semester chemistry course ? The calculation of what burning fossil fuels is doing to the atmosphere could be done on an Indigo. Heck, they could be done on an HP-35. For that matter, you could get a quick approximation with a pencil and a piece of paper. What are we doing about it ? Killing wind energy and promoting fracking, that's what we're doing about it ! Aren't we smart ? That way when the atmosphere cannot sustain the seven billion humans we have, we'll also have screwed up the ground water ! Everything will be poisoned, isn't that cool ?

These are only a very few examples of the imbecility that is rife in this human-dominated world. There are thousands more. Hundreds of thousands. Most humans could not pour piss out of a boot with instructions written on the heel - and the "techies" of computerdom are the worst of the lot.

You're going to stand there and seriously claim that "artificial intelligence" is possible for a species as stupid as this ?

sgifanatic wrote: Well, some very great people have held a point of view similar to yours.

Your examples of very great people are an eighteenth-century German writer that no one ever heard of, a wacked-out preacher that no one ever heard of, The Quarterly Review ??, and a patent office commissioner ? The same patent office that gave The Great Innovator a patent for a black rectangle with rounded corners ? I'm overwhelmed with shame that I can't see the brightly glowing light at the end of your tunnel. I guess my eyes don't respond to pixie dust anymore.

In light of Tweeter and Faceblob, the quote of Thoreau seems remarkably prescient.

The problem is not, as some people like to claim, that we are "afraid of the future" or "afraid of technology." The fact is that some of us have seen where "technology" and "the future" have tended to go. We aren't afraid of it. We are afraid that it will truly be the stinking shit that it has shown every sign of becoming.

In fact, I'm not even afraid of that. I'm very certain of it. With the exception of dentistry, I can't think of a single thing that is as good today as it was in 1975. There must be something but ...

sgifanatic wrote: I don't think this discussion is going anywhere, and frankly, after the comment above, I doubt it will go anywhere. Adieu.

we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender ...

Once upon a time the silver and black was a bunch of misfits, graduates of the university of mars. If we were six points behind at the two-minute warning, we would win. If we were ten points behind we would probably win. If we were fourteen points behind, there was a good chance we'd get into overtime. If we were twenty-one points behind it didn't matter, every single Raider would still play his heart out and his ass off until the final whistle.

Not once did any Raider ever go crying back to mommy that the mean joe green spit on the football and he didn't want to touch it.

R-ten-K wrote: self awareness, that post has none...

Could you diagram that sentence, please ? I didn't do very well in my ESL courses

hamei wrote: The calculation of what burning fossil fuels is doing to the atmosphere could be done on an Indigo.

Close. What you need is a 4D/380VGX Power Series. My 4D/380VGX, featured in this article when it was brand new:

It still has the original name (`dali') and Fraunhofer asset tags, and it still runs fine. Not too often though, because requires burning lots of fossil fuel

hamei wrote: The new definition of hell is, to have something to type but stuck on an iBad or a "smart"phone.

You're not obliged to peruse these - surely, even in China, there's lot of alternative junk to choose from

hamei wrote: Mmm. Well, if you are one of those people who get insulted when a sanitation engineer is called a janitor or a marketing specialist a whore, then I guess you could consider it vitriolic. In my day we called a spade, "spade".

LOL.